


epithalamion

by illumynare



Category: Hymn to Demeter - Homer
Genre: F/M, tw: greek gods
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-18
Updated: 2019-12-18
Packaged: 2021-02-26 06:14:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,019
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21844990
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/illumynare/pseuds/illumynare
Summary: Five times Persephone didn’t want to eat the fruit of death, and one time she did.
Relationships: Hades/Persephone
Comments: 9
Kudos: 30
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	epithalamion

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AceQueenKing](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AceQueenKing/gifts).



> **Warnings:** mentions/fear of rape, one swear word, an incident of self-harm, and all the general dysfunction of the Olympian gods.

**CHRONOS** : the time that is counted

When I am very young, I ask my mother why we never go to Olympus. Why we live in secret, hidden fields and dance only with the humblest and most forgotten nymphs. Why I have never been wed like the mortal girls who pray to us, nor bred like the springtime animals that come to lick my hands and fawn at my feet.

 _Are we afraid?_ I ask.

My mother smiles sadly and shakes her head, the golden rivulets of her hair shivering against one another.

 _We are wise,_ she says. _And we know._

That night, as we lie together in our single bed, my mother’s arms wrapped tightly around my waist, she whispers to me what she knows: the gaping maw of Kronos as he swallowed his children and ground them between his teeth. The answering greed in his sons: my father Zeus, who sires children on every woman he can seduce; Poseidon, who once changed himself to a stallion so he could rape my mother when she tried to hide herself in the form of a mare; and Hades, who swallows up every dead soul as Kronos swallowed every one of his children.

 _This is what it means to be a goddess on Olympus,_ she breathes into my hair, sadly, fiercely, surely. _To be taken. To be owned._

_Stay unknown and free, my child._

* * *

**1.**

The nymphs sing to me—sometimes, secretly—of love and of abducting lovers. Despite my mother's warnings, I thrill to their whispered songs. I am happy, living with my mother, but sometimes the quiet groves and meadows where we dance feel so very small. It is sweet to dream of a lover rending me away into some thrilling, vast new world. Of embraces even fiercer and more passionate than my mother's. 

It is nothing sweet, what happens on the plain of Nysa. 

The earth is wet and dark and trembling under my feet. I think perhaps it is only my divinity that sends ripples through the soft ground as I gather the honest daffodil, the clustered hyacinth, and the ruffled iris. But as I bend low to pluck another stem, the earth shudders and parts. I stagger back, gasping for breath—and then there are hands around my waist, dragging me into a chariot as my feet flail like hooked fish. 

My captor does not look at me. I am no more than the gasping, dying fish in his net as he grips the reins and clucks to the night-black horses. My scream is swallowed up by the thunder of hooves, and the yawning walls of wet-black earth.

When the chariot finally stops, he hauls me up into his arms and carries me—my feet are limp now, and hopeless—into a vast, dark hall carved of ivory and gold but draped in shadows and cobwebs. The only light comes from the candles standing on a table spread with no food but glistening, quivering fruits.

“Welcome, my queen,” he says, setting me down into a coffin-cold chair. “Eat and be merry.”

I stare at him, pinioned by fear. His face is handsome and yet subtly _wrong:_ his skin too pale, and drawn too tightly over the proud bones of his face; his thin, bloodless lips a fraction too wide. The long, tangled locks of his lustrous black hair are the only part of him that does not unsettle me.

I stare at that hair as I ask, my voice quavering, “Who _are_ you?”

He startles. “I am called Hades and Aidoneus and Agesander,” he says, his voice slightly baffled. “Your husband.”

_“What?”_

“Your father Zeus gave you to me as a bride,” he says, still with that note of surprise, as if he can’t believe I don’t know.

Zeus. My stomach lurches as I remember all the tales my mother told me. I had believed that, as his daughter, I was one of the few women he could not touch. 

But he still found a way to have me fucked. 

I think of how childishly I dreamed about an abducting lover. I stare at my new husband, and for the first time in my life, my heart kindles with the full heat of a woman’s fury.

“Eat,” he tells me again, gesturing at the table.

My fingers close around a ripe plum and crush it to pulp, juice spurting between my fingers like blood.

Then I throw the wreckage of the plum into his face.

* * *

**2.**

I know what comes next. 

Whatever the gods want, they take. Hades has taken my freedom, and he will take my body too. I know it will happen, certain as I know the sun will rise and set.

When Hades leaves me in a bedroom carved of sapphire and ivory, I do not lie down on the silk-draped bed. I know I am not safe. I pace the room and gnaw my own fingers bloody, until the cold white bones are slick beneath my tongue and teeth. The pain and the hot tang of blood in my mouth are all that keep me sane. 

_I will break myself before I let him feast on me,_ I think. _I will ruin whatever he loves. Blood and raw bones is all he will get of me._

I think this, over and over, as I pace the room. As my bloodied fingers knit themselves back together. As I wait and wait and wait.

When the night is over—I can still feel the course of Helios, even so far below—I am a virgin still.

I do not know what that means.

Hades comes to my door with another dish of jewel-bright, quivering fruit. I tell him to leave, and he does.

I do not know what that means, either.

* * *

**3.**

If I did not fear Hades, I might learn to love his Underworld.

His palace is wrought of ivory and rubies, iron and sapphire, silver and gold and stone. Sometimes it is damp and always it is cold; but also it is exquisitely crafted, every turret and curlicue an artwork.

Beyond the walls of his palace grow field after field of the fruits of death: apple and pomegranate, peach and plum, cherry and pear. A cold and lightless dew clusters on that fruit; the shades gibber beneath it, reaching phantom hands to grasp the sweetness.

The shades. The dead. The _many_ that my husband hosts. They frighten me at first, and then they disgust me, and then—

They are honest, is what I think of them, hate and love about them. 

The dead cannot lie, no matter how duplicitous they were in life. In my first week, I hear a thousand truths: _I hated. I murdered. I raped. I stole. I seduced. I blasphemed._

I stagger beneath the weight of those whispers. It is worse than summer rains, than autumn gusts of wind, than anything I ever suffered in the world above.

And yet, I am a goddess, who can bear all things and remain beautiful. I am the goddess of spring, the season that rends and devours all previous things to make new life.

The shades learn that I will listen, and forgive. They cluster around me, desperate to be shriven of their sins. 

_O Persephone,_ they whisper. _O Koré. O mistress of the house where many dwell._

Prayers thrum along my bones, fill my throat and my brain as they never did when I was a maiden goddess, unknown to all but my mother. And I drink up those prayers greedily.

 _Rest,_ I tell them. _Forget and be forgotten. Have peace now._

_Sleep easily, as I cannot._

One day, I am sitting with the shade of a woman who murdered her children to spite their father. She sobs into my lap in endless grief, her tears like the spring rains. In reply, a thousand tiny green seedlings sprout from my thighs and the stone floor beneath us.

“You rule them well,” says Hades.

I startle, my hands covering the woman’s head instinctively.

“Aren’t you angry that I pardon them?” I ask.

I have seen only the edges of Tartarus, the abyss where punishment is unending, but the echoing screams haunt my dreams.

“My punishments are for those who will not confess their guilt,” says Hades, implacably calm. 

The dead woman shudders and flickers beneath my palms. Her grief and her guilt are nearly spent; in a moment she will fall into the sleep of all forgiven souls and fade away from me, and I press a kiss to her skull in the moment before she does.

Then I raise my eyes to my husband.

“You would never pardon them yourself,” I say.

“No,” he agrees. “It is not in my nature.”

I raise my eyebrows.

“Were you fully crowned a goddess, with a seat upon Olympus, you would understand,” he explains. “We are each of us eternally only what we are. I am death and judgement; I cannot be other.” He shrugs. “This is, what is.”

Anger sparks behind my ribs as I surge to my feet. “And my abduction, is that just _what is?_ ”

He stares at me as if I am the only water in a desert.

“I am death,” he says helplessly. “I take.”

* * *

**4.**

He does try.

Hades tries to court me, and it is the most insulting and yet pitiful—and almost lovable—thing I have ever seen.

He leaves a pile of teeth and golden rings at my door, because both are precious.

He notices me shivering in the ceaseless chill of the underworld, and he brings me a clay dish of eternally burning coals.

He gives me pile after pile of dead flowers, already wilted and starting to rot by the time he gives them—and yet the sour-sweet smell is welcome, because it is a stench that exists only in the living world.

“Were I a nymph and you a satyr,” I tell him, “I might consider you to have earned a single kiss.”

“I am a god,” he says, endlessly simple.

“I know. And you seem to think I should drop into your hand like ripe fruit.”

“All souls do.”

“All souls are mortal, and dead.” I grimace at him, crushing a grape between my thumb and forefinger. “If you wanted me to be the same, you should have killed me.”

We have reached a truce lately, where we sit together in the evenings, and I play with the fruit I will not eat. He speaks little, but sometimes he laughs when I am most irreverent; and his gaze is always like a prayer.

(Lately, I am greedy for such prayers.)

I expect that Hades will laugh now, but instead, he frowns. “To kill a god is no laughing matter.”

Breath dies in my throat. I feel small and furious as I surge to my feet, as I say, “And I? Was I a _laughing matter_ , when you bought me from Zeus and stole me from my mother?”

“I did not pay for you,” he says. “I asked.”

“ _You did not ask me.”_

We stare at each other for a long time, my heart pounding fast as the feet of a young rabbit.

“What do you want?” he asks finally.

It is not, _Will you be my bride._ But that question could only be a farce, now that I am granted by the father of gods and held by the king of death.

At least it is _a_ question.

“I want a garden,” I tell him. “With lamps, and the kind of flowers that grow above in the sunlight. Will you help me build it?”

“I will,” he says.

He does.

Something grows between us in the days that follow, as he raises marble walls and I dig trenches. As I guide his hands in planting, and we lean together over the dark, damp earth. 

Hades does not command me, as my mother did, when we danced up the seedlings in the world above. He listens, and waits, and I revel in that as much as I revel in building something of my very own, for the first time in all my endless years.

At last the garden is prepared, the seeds planted, and it is time for me to dance. I do not wait to wash the dirt from my hands, or put on a clean robe; I cup my hands, and remember sunlight, and began to dance barefoot on the damp earth. It is hard at first. I feel the vast weight of the piled rock above us, and the sterile chill of death.

But I am Persephone, I am spring, I am endless and undying. I make the grass to sprout and the flowers to bloom. I find my rhythm, and my feet drum life into the ground. Tiny green shoots emerge, stretch, put out leaves. I laugh for the joy of being _myself_ again, as I do something I never did before: bring blossoms all on my own, without my mother’s help.

I come to the end of my dance, my breath burning in my chest, sweat trickling down my neck and between my breasts. Hades sits before me in rapt silence, and in his eyes is that rarest of treasures: the worship of a god.

I am aware, suddenly and very sharply, of the space between us. Of the graceful lines of his mouth and throat. Of the fire creeping below my skin, and what my body has suddenly, willfully decided to want.

 _Oh,_ I think. _This is why the nymphs sang so sweetly._

_Oh, no._

* * *

**5.**

Alone at night, I brood and think. The bright gods of Olympus, they seize whatever they want. But the dark god who dwells beneath earth, in the skeleton beneath the skin of every living creature—he waits.

And waits.

And only _waits._

A bowl of wine-dark plums sits beside my bed, untouched as my virginity. Untasted as my skin. I stare at the dark curves, and for all my fury, I wait and I long and I _want_. 

But what do I want?

If only Hades would treat me as Zeus treats everyone, this hunger that aches through my body would be satisfied. And I could forgive him, in time; if I had no hope left, then I could break myself according to his will. I could love it, as my mother never loved Zeus.

But he has left me as willful and furious and free as a worm eating through a corpse. So I cannot want to be his possession, and I cannot want to be free.

I want my mother. I want to see the sunlight once again, and with that comfortingly impossible hunger, I lull myself to sleep.

I wake to the moaning sorrow of a god.

I do not realize, at first, that is why the air shakes and shudders around me. I think it is only another quirk of the Underworld. But as I come fully awake, I taste the air on my teeth, and I know: this is my husband, my captor. This is his grief and his woe.

Tasting it, I stagger through the hallways of his palace, until the stench of blood is so strong I can taste it. I thrust the door open, and I find him: Aidoneus, the Host of Many, pressed flat and quivering against his bed as the divine ichor flows from his veins, his wrists and thighs and throat.

 _Kronos devoured us,_ my mother told me, and yet I never truly understood it until this moment, when I see my husband-captor trembling into his bed, the memory of teeth writing itself across his skin, and my heart suddenly rends itself in pity.

I climb into that bed. I kiss his chest, his throat, his eyes. I tell him: “Hush and know that I am here.”

And when he wakes from his nightmare—when he stares up at me as if I am all the laws and vows that bind even the gods—I kiss him again. And again. I give him the virginity he could not bring himself to rob from me, our limbs struggling and mingling and locking together, until at last he sleeps upon my breast.

Afterward, I smooth his hair, and I think: he is not sorry for what he did to me. He cannot be sorry. He is immortal and unchanging, and he cannot regret my kidnapping any more than Kronos could have regretted devouring his children.

But he loves me, and he is mine.

And yet I still am not his: in the morning, again I refuse to eat the fruit.

* * *

**KAIROS** : the time that is right

Hermes is bright and golden and ruthless: everything I dreamed of once, when I tried to imagine a god loving me.

He is everything I hate now, as he tells us: 

Zeus has made a plan. Zeus has decreed. I belong to my mother, every fingertip chained to the wheat and the flowers, and because Demeter’s grief disrupts the offerings due the gods—I must be offered back to her. 

I will be given a crown and a seat on Olympus. The full measure of eternity will overtake me, and I will be nothing but a sunlight, flowering creature: the daughter that my mother lost, who does not quite exist anymore.

Hades holds my hand as Hermes delivers the news, finger playing against finger.

When Hermes has delivered his message and gone, I turn to Hades. 

I think: _I can leave you now._

I think: _They are taking me._

Between those two truths, at last I find freedom. I squeeze my husband’s hands in mine, and I ask him, finally: “Will you give me your fruit?”

He stares at me a moment before he responds: “Will you eat it?”

There is a precipice deeper than Tartarus yawning in my stomach, but I know what I want. What I need. What I love.

I kiss his palm. “Feed me,” I command my husband.

One pomegranate seed after another, he does.

And so our eternity begins.


End file.
